July 04, 2006

Isn't it odd that people celebrate their independence by igniting things that sound like bombs and machine guns? Is it even stranger that these things bring a half-second of joy for the amount of work that was put into it? Is it even more strange still that every last bit of this thing was taken from the earth in some fashion or another only to be designed to become yet more waste?

Peace goes beyond humanism. Peace, what little is left, must be preserved beyond ourselves and returned to the non-human world as well.

July 4th marks the day of the colonizer's independence, resulting in the freest state in the world. But this freedom, privelage, and luxury was created from the whipped backs of slaves, on the brutalized bodies of Indians, by the calloused hands of Asians, by the sweat of farmers, from child labor, and from the never-ending destruction of the natural, non-human world.

We need to remember that the only way to create a truly peaceful world, peace must extend beyond ourselves and maximize the freedom of all beings--even at a cost to ourselves.

There is no peace without sacrifice. We have to first understand that our way of life is destructive. We then have to make amends and devote our lives to healing what left there is to heal.

Peace goes beyond party politics. Peace goes beyond the state. In order to live in a world that maximizes independence of all beings in a state of understood relationships, we must be willing to accept these facts.

When we say "Fourth World First!", we're making a declaration that not only are we devoted to the liberation and justice of Indigenous people around the world, we are also declaring our allegiance to the rest of the world that makes Indigenous people who they are: ecology, natural processes, the landscape, the relationships between people and their habitat. This, then, can only mean the destruction of the way of life that has eveloped most every population on the planet.

Bringing soldiers home is one tiny step in a very long, painful journey. There will be failures and there will be successes. But the journey must be made!